“The history being made this time is we’re launching what we call an operational flight to the International Space Station,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters Friday. It is a capsule, similar in shape to the spacecraft which preceded Space Shuttle, and its launch vehicle is a reusable SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. NASA turned to SpaceX and Boeing after shuttering the checkered Space Shuttle program in 2011, which failed in its main objectives of making space travel affordable and safe. But the fact that a national space agency feels moved to compare itself to a company is arguably a validation of NASA’s public-private strategy. The cost of round-trips on Russian rockets had been rising and stood at around $85 million per astronaut, according to estimates last year.

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer November 15, 2020 06:22 UTC